(A graph-heavy post on the post-WWII history of political instability.)

Despite its ubiquity in everyday discourse, I find the concept of “political instability” to exasperatingly vague, encompassing everything from polarized electorates to coups to civil war. Nevertheless, one can still understand most of the phenomena that fall under that rubric as the sorts of events that happen when the norms supposedly regulating political competition fail to be “motivationally relevant” for sufficiently powerful groups of people. Very wide-ranging normative breakdowns are revolutions and civil wars (Jack Goldstone once noted that the great revolutions were characterized by “fractal” breakdowns of norms); but coups, other forms of “irregular” leader exit, spikes of protest, and transitional situations can be understood as moments where the norms that are supposed to channel and limit the competition for power break down, either because sufficiently powerful groups disagree about what the relevant norms are, or because they can disregard them with impunity and perhaps wish to impose alternative norms.

The identification of political instability events is unavoidably fraught, since what counts as the relevant norm governing political competition, and whether the norm has actually been violated, disregarded, or otherwise violently reinterpreted, will often be disputed. Sometimes it will simply be impossible to tell whether some particular event – e.g, the recent happenings in Lesotho or the Gambia – counts as a coup, or whether the fall of some leader is in accordance with “recognized” norms of political competition; indeed, I take it that sometimes there is simply no fact of the matter, though perhaps the very existence of disagreement about the nature of the event (whether some coup counts as the beginning of a revolution, for example) is itself significant. And of course many events that signal the weakness of norms regulating political competition – aborted coup attempts, thwarted palace conspiracies – simply never see the light of day. Nevertheless, it is still possible to get a glimpse of the broad patterns of political instability during the post WWII era.

Here’s one way of doing it. (See the note on code and data at the end for details). The picture below graphs five forms of instability, per country: the estimated level of democracy and thus regime change, for the period 1946-2012 (from the Unified Democracy Scores by Pemstein, Meserve, and Melton); vertical red and blue lines are, respectively, successful and unsuccessful overt coup attempts for the period 1950-2014 (from the data gathered by Powell and Thyne); dotted black lines track irregular leader exits (sometimes coinciding, sometimes not, with the coup data from Powell and Thyne, and including everything from assassinations to revolutionary overthrow), from the period 1946-2004 (from the Archigos dataset by Goemans, Gleditsch, and Chiozza - can’t wait for their update to 2014!); shaded colored areas track armed conflict episodes from 1946 to 2008 (from the UCDP-ucdpConflict dataset); and light grey shaded areas track periods of “interruption,” “interregnum,” or “transition” (basically, foreign occupation, anarchy, political breakdown or transition) from the polity dataset, in the 1946 to 2013 period. The figure is organized as follows: countries with the most coups are at the top; countries with no coups but the most years of armed conflict follow:

Coups, wars, irregular leadership transitions, changes in democracy, and periods of “interruption” are distinct phenomena, but they all indicate normative breakdowns or normative fluidity (as in periods of transition to democracy, where the norms regulating political competition are not yet recognized by all relevant actors). The graph is deliberately crowded – I tried to create something like the spectral lines of chemical elements – yet there are some obvious patterns. Latin American countries have suffered from more from coups and irregular leadership transitions than from major armed conflict, and their levels of democracy have fluctuated more (Bolivia and Argentina compete for the dubious honor of having had the most coups and coup attempts - counting an overt coup attempt as half a coup); South Asian countries have suffered more from major armed conflict. Some countries in the Middle East (Iraq and Syria, for example) have lots of just about everything. Here are some regional breakdowns that I find strangely beautiful:

Here are the continents:

And finally, the world:

Haiti and the Dominican Republic are especially striking:

Let’s look at coups in more detail. They are more associated with the lower levels of democracy:

Most coups are associated with decreases in democracy; but especially since the end of the cold war, some lead to democratic outcomes. The classic case was the revolution of the carnations in Portugal.

Coups after the cold war have tended to be more democratizing, as Marinov and note.

Another way of visualizing political instability is to look at changes in regime. Geddes, Wright, and Frantz have gathered fairly granular data on regime types, focusing on whether the main institutions of the regime are the military, a single party, a monarchy, or some combination of the three, and on the degree of “personalism” in the regime. And though military regimes always emerge form succcesful coups, many times what comes out of a coup is not a military regime - but often a personalistic one.

Instability is associated with poverty; but some surprisingly rich countries do not suffer from much instability, while some very poor countries have little recorded instability.

Coups are more common in poor countries, as one might expect, and they appear to be more succesful in such countries:

Indeed, all forms of instability are more common at lower levels of income.Yet some surprisingly poor countries have little instability, and some surprisingly rich ones do, though countries tend to graduate from instability after htey reach a (country-specific) threshold:

Low growth is less associated with coups than one might expect (there’s no particular difference in mean between the growth rates of countries with instability and without), though there is a hint of greater instability at the tail end of the distribution of growth rates. Very low growth rates seem to be correlated with instability:

But most countries that experience cooups have lower growth rates both before and after the instability event:

After and before cold war